A Reckoning with Specters in John Banville’s Frames Trilogy*

John Banville's Frames Trilogy, comprising the novels The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995), presents an account of the ghosts existent in both the reality and art surrounding one's life.In a riveting first-person narration, Freddie Montgomery, the protagonist in all the novels, describes spectral apparitions in works of art and is haunted by his violent, ghostly past.The inextricable oscillation between reality and art, as studied previously, for instance, by Anja Mller ( 2004) and Neil Murphy ( 2024) is revealed in an ekphrastic manner throughout the novels.Here I attempt to unlock the trilogy from an alternative, hauntological perspective that is meant to shed new, spectral light on these two realms.As a philosophical and literary approach theorized by Jacques Derrida in his influential Specters of Marx (1994), hauntology will be used as a theoretical framework to scrutinize the ghosts that appear to Montgomery in works of art.I will thereby perform a hauntological reading where the functions of the ghosts will be analysed in each novel and I will thus illuminate details about the ghosts generating the aforementioned oscillation in connection to Montgomery's violent past, as well as determine what these ghosts finally amount to for the narrator.